Basic SEO Tips For The Busy Business Owner

If you own a business and have a website, search engine optimization (SEO) will help your site get seen by more customers. SEO helps your site rank higher in the search engine results for Google and Bing. Here are a few basic SEO tips which can help make your SEO more effective. Good SEO includes different methods for increasing the likelihood your site coming up higher up in the list presented to searching visitors. When this happens, you generally receive more traffic to your website. Intensive SEO can mean an entire restructuring of your site. However, there are a few simple things you can do yourself to increase your site’s search engine ranking.

Know Where You Stand

There is no way to know for certain that your SEO techniques are effective unless you know where you stand in the search engine results before you start. There are online tools such as Google toolbar and Alexa which allow you to monitor your site’s page rank. It is also important to track the search terms or keywords your visitors are using to reach your site and where they care coming from.

Good Keywords – possible, usable and related

Another important part of effective SEO is choosing the right keywords. Keywords are strategically placed throughout the content on your site, as well as in headlines, URLs, and image names. The two most important places to insert keywords are in the page header and the title tag. When you are considering which keywords to use, think about the search terms that a customer would use to find information on the topic – business for sale vs business to sell – for example. They mean the same but one is an owner looking to list, vs someone looking to buy.

One caution, do not overuse a particular keyword within your content. This is called keyword stuffing and the search engines may penalize your site in their rankings.

Internal Links

One of the most basic SEO strategies is to include internal links within your site content. This is one of the easiest ways to boost traffic. Always link back to archived content when you create new content. Also, remember to make any anchor text relevant and do not use too man links.

A Sitemap

Another basic SEO strategy is to add a sitemap to your website. This is a page on your site that lists all the pages and links to them. Adding a sitemap makes it easier for the search engine spiders to search your site. It makes no sense to people or users, but it essential to the robotic spiders crawling the site. It seems a total waste of time, but is actually important. They say.

Put the keyword in the url

An oldie, but goodie: use keywords in your URLs and to make them short and to the point. Create URLs that are easy to understand and remember.

NO FLASH!

Sadly, sites that look really sharp with Flash and all sort of clever animations, are slow to load and that hurts your Many sites add flash to their site, this does not help your site’s SEO. Plus, the big problem with adding flash to your site is that there is no way to link to an individual page.

Alt Tags

The search engine spiders search only the text on your website, not the images. This is why it is important to make use of any space or association with an image to add another relevant piece of information, or the keyword itself. Even naming the image is effective if you can get that name to include keywords. Do this for for each image on your site. If you include an ALT tag after each image name, you can also include a description.

Conclusion

When you want your website to grow and attract more visitors, good SEO is an important first step. Even basic SEO tips can make a difference in helping your site’s ranking in the search engine results. The higher up you are in the list, the more visitors you get. Hence, SEO is a Good Thing. 🙂